Policy Research — Who Needs It?

The relationship between government policymaking and policy research changes over time and between governments. It seldom follows the orderly sequence of logical events which researchers may like to imagine. In attempting to understand the relationship between the creation of knowledge and its use by policymakers, it is essential to understand the needs and behavior of politicians, the pressures upon their time and the wide range of channels of information, informal as well as formal, open to them and to their immediate advisers. Social policy research, partly because of its frequent ambiguity and partiality, is particularly likely to be ignored by its official consumers in government. Some social and economic questions are probably not capable of effective testing by research other than by governments putting policies into effect on a national scale. Evaluation of such experiments is difficult. More attention needs to be paid to the marketing of ideas by pressure groups and think tanks. Governments can shop around for acceptable advice from a wide range of sources outside academic life. Except in highly consensual political cultures, the only decisions which are made primarily on the basis of research findings are politically unimportant ones. In considering the role of policy research it is essential to keep the primacy of politics firmly in mind.     

Between reform and Islam: The Arab spring in Jordan 2011–2014

This article discusses the Arab Spring in Jordan and the reasons the Hashemite regime was able to survive it. Liberals, retired military officers, young people, members of tribes, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood all participated in the demonstrations against the regime, which began in January 2011. In the beginning, it seemed that diversified demonstrations would bring about the regime’s collapse, as happened in other Arab countries. But in the end, it turned out that each group acted in its own interests. Tribal leaders worried about economic concerns, liberals sought to promote political reform, and the Muslim Brotherhood demanded the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. The lack of a common goal combined with Jordan’s policy of allowing demonstrations free from the fear of violent repression, sapped protesters’ motivation and minimized the number of participants. The fear of the type of anarchy and terror seen in Syria and Egypt also frightened the protesters and led them to the conclusion that it is better to live in an undemocratic but stable regime than pursue a fight for democracy that might end badly. Ultimately, it was King Abdullah’s astute political strategy in combination with international contingencies that enabled Jordan’s Hashemite regime to survive the Arab Spring.     

Some Remarks on the "Generalized Event Count" Distribution

King (1989) presented the "Generalized Event Count" (GEC) modelas a means of dealing with event count data when the analystis unsure whether the data are "underdispersed" or "overdispersed."Here I establish several useful properties of the GEC modeland make some practical suggestions for estimation.     

A Fast, Easy, and Efficient Estimator for Multiparty Electoral Data

Katz and King have previously developed a model for predictingor explaining aggregate electoral results in multiparty democracies.Their model is, in principle, analogous to what least-squaresregression provides American political researchers in that two-partysystem. Katz and King applied their model to three-party electionsin England and revealed a variety of new features of incumbencyadvantage and sources of party support. Although the mathematicsof their statistical model covers any number of political parties,it is computationally demanding, and hence slow and numericallyimprecise, with more than three parties. In this paper we producean approximate method that works in practice with many partieswithout making too many theoretical compromises. Our approachis to treat the problem as one of missing data. This allowsus to use a modification of the fast EMis algorithm of King,Honaker, Joseph, and Scheve and to provide easy-to-use software,while retaining the attractive features of the Katz and Kingmodel, such as the t distribution and explicit models for uncontestedseats.     

The Educational Correlates of Voting: A Cross‐sectional Study of Finnish Undergraduates’ Turnout in the 2014 European Parliament Election

Why do well‐educated citizens show high turnout in elections? Despite broad scholarly agreement that educational attainment predicts electoral participation, there is little consensus about which aspects of higher education account for this positive association. This study addresses this gap in the empirical literature by investigating the educational correlates of micro‐level turnout. To this end, the article first discuss two types of factors that prior research has suggested to connect higher education to voting: participation‐enhancing benefits; and the type of education. Using a unique, nationally representative survey of the 2012 cohort of Finnish undergraduates, the relative importance of and relationships between these competing factors in explaining the students’ intended voting in the 2014 European Parliament election are tested. It is found that turnout is positively associated with the student’s sense of political efficacy, which also mediates between an open classroom environment and turnout. Furthermore, students enrolled in the academic university track have stronger voting intentions – an effect that reflects their sense of civic duty. By contrast, no support is found for the effect of social network centrality. These results suggest that several, but not all, elements of higher education as discussed in the literature are relevant for electoral participation.     

Swimming for Their Lives—Waving or Drowning? A Review of the Evidence of Ministerial Overload and of Potential Remedies for It

There is a range of evidence pointing to the problem of overload on government ministers in both the UK and other Westminster-system countries. This article reviews evidence from the time of Gladstone to the present day, concentrating on evidence relating to the last twenty five years. It surveys the comments and opinions of serving and retired politicians and of academic commentators, assessing the contention that the burden on ministers has increased, is likely to continue to increase, and ought to be diminished. It goes on to look at what have been put forward as potential solutions and explores the extent to which they might offer some respite. Finally, the article concludes that the remedy to the problems involved largely lies in the hands of ministers and their closest advisers, and suggests that it is in all our interests that options to reduce overload should be further explored and implemented.     

‘Remaining awake through a great revolution’: The rhetorical strategies of Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King, Jr is the most recognisable face of the black Civil Rights movement in America in the 1950s and 1960s. His ‘I’ have a Dream’ speech, given in 1963 as part of the march on Washington, has been identified as a key moment in American history, beyond just its importance to the Civil Rights movement. King's lasting place in American history has recently been codified in the declaration of his birthday as a National Holiday by the Reagan Administration in 1986. Unlike other Civil Rights leaders, King gained support from black and white communities for his program of change. In fact, King's major successes in gaining Presidential support for Civil Rights Bills in 1964 and 1965 resulted from his ability to win the support of Northern white liberals for Federal intervention in Southern race relations. Although considerable work has been done on the methods through which King's campaigns sought to tap white support for Civil Rights, scant attention has been given to one of the central vehicles through which King was able to mobilise white support, his language. Despite the publication of two recent studies on King's rhetoric, (Miller 1992; Lischer 1995) scholars have largely ignored King's rhetoric as a source of study. In this paper, I seek to fill some of this gap by analysing the key rhetorical strategies King employs to win support from his predominantly white audience in his speech ‘Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution’.     

Anthony King and the United States

Anthony King was a keen follower of American politics. His writings on the subject combined his respect for democratic practices with a strong concern for deliberation in governance. These concerns, familiar from his writings on the UK, caused him to worry that American politicians campaigned too much and governed too little.     

An Easy and Accurate Regression Model for Multiparty Electoral Data

Katz and King have previously proposed a statistical model formultiparty election data. They argue that ordinary least-squares(OLS) regression is inappropriate when the dependent variablemeasures the share of the vote going to each party, and theyrecommend a superior technique. Regrettably, the Katz–Kingmodel requires a high level of statistical expertise and iscomputationally demanding for more than three political parties.We offer a sophisticated yet convenient alternative that involvesseemingly unrelated regression (SUR). SUR is nearly as easyto use as OLS yet performs as well as the Katz–King modelin predicting the distribution of votes and the compositionof parliament. Moreover, it scales easily to an arbitrarilylarge number of parties. The model has been incorporated intoClarify, a statistical suite that is available free on the Internet.     

Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).     

Book Notes

Why People Don't Trust Government J.S. Nye, P.D. Zelikow and D.C. King.
Canberra 1912: Plans and Planners of the Australian Capital Competition J.W. Reps.
Issues in Accrual Output Budgeting Financial Reform Division, WA Treasury.
Unlocking the Infrastructure: The Reform of Public Utilities in Australia Stephen King and Rodney Maddock.
The Spirit of Reform: Managing the New Zealand State Sector in a Time of Change Allen Schick (Report prepared for the State Services Commission and the Treasury.     

Social Equity and Evidence: Insights from Local Government

This article examines the role of evidence‐based decision making in social equity, with a particular focus on local government. It offers an assessment of the past, present, and future of such efforts by engaging themes from Matias Valenzuela's article based on King County, Washington. King County is one of more than 70 local governments that are members of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a growing national network of governments using an evidence‐based approach to achieve racial equity. In general, previous social equity measures have focused largely on measuring the extent to which disparities exist. More recently, tools and resources have become available to assist local governments in designing and evaluating their approach and performance in reducing social inequities. Future evidence should include more standardized measures to benchmark success, provide comparative analysis, and better support the identification of best practices.     

Martin Luther King's Civil Disobedience and the American Covenant Tradition

Daniel J. Elazar introduced the covenant idea to political sciencein his four-volume work, The Covenant Tradition in Politics.As he showed, American government and society are indebted tocovenant ways of New England Puritans and their doctrine, "federaltheology". Puritan covenants fostered polities whose framesof government and patterns of civil order established a federalmatrix antecedent to modern American federalism. The moral orientationof covenant has also influenced modern American political thought,as evidenced by the public philosophy articulated by the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement(1954–1968). In such works as "The Letter from the BirminghamCity Jail," King challenged his contemporaries' ideas aboutlaw and justice, Americans with an opportunity to examine moderncovenant practice.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Boundaries of Law, Politics and Religion by Lewis V. Baldwin. Against Us, But For Us: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the State by Michael G. Long. Macon.     

Presidential address— Seeing through the fog

All public policies have two things in common. They deal with the future and, as a result, they are based on forecasts or projections. The forecasts or projections may be implicit or based on naive extrapolation or ad hoc assumptions. They may be explicit and based on elaborate extrapolations or on behavioral models. In either case, unfortunately, they are notoriously unreliable. In fact, they almost always are wrong—sometimes just a bit wrong, but often massively wrong. Nonetheless, forecasts are what distinguishes reasoned planning from blind action. Without forecasts, we would be totally at sea. That we have to use forecasts or projections, that we know they will be wrong, and that they usually are wrong raise some difficult questions for policy analysis and policymaking. Regrettably, in my view, they receive too little attention.2 My purpose today is to urge that they receive more. My comments are intended to make four points. First, it is important for policymakers to appreciate how errorprone forecasts and projections actually are. Second, it is important not to permit the availability of projections or forecasts to obscure fundamental policy questions that are important in any plausible scenario. Third, uncertainty means that, where possible, it is prudent to design policies with builtin flexibility that respond automatically to diverse possible outcomes. Fourth, where builtin flexibility is impossible, complete analyses should take into account the consequences if forecasts prove wrong, and weigh those consequences against the results of postponing action until information improves or against other policies under the plausible range of possible outcomes. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

THE IMPACTS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF COLLEGE INSTRUCTORS ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC AND LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES

Based on a novel data set that links college administrative information with earnings records from a state college system for both public two‐year and four‐year colleges, this study quantifies the impacts of exposure to different types of instructors during students’ initial semester in college on their subsequent academic and labor market outcomes. To minimize bias from student sorting by type of instructor, we combine course‐set fixed effects with an instrumental variables approach that exploits term‐by‐term fluctuations in faculty composition in each department, therefore controlling for both between‐ and within‐course sorting. The findings suggest that two‐year students, particularly racial minority students, have substantially higher levels of exposure to adjuncts with temporary appointments than four‐year students. Two‐year students taking a heavy course schedule with temporary adjuncts are adversely affected in college persistence and subsequent credit accumulation, and the penalty is particularly pronounced among males and racial minority students with stronger academic potential. Such negative impacts on academic outcomes do not translate into poorer short‐ to medium‐term labor market performance. In the four‐year setting, no significant distinction is identified between different types of instructors on either student academic or labor market outcomes.     

King Canute and the 'Problem' of Structure and Agency: On Times, Tides and Heresthetics

The story of King Canute (Cnut) is well known. Indeed, in perhaps its most familiar form it exists as an oral historical tradition passed from generation to generation. In this almost legendary account, King Canute is depicted as an arrogant ruler, so confident as to his own omnipotence that he takes on the forces of nature, pitting his own powers against those of the rising tide – his wet robes paying testament to his powerlessness in the face of potent material forces and to the triumph of (natural) structures over (human) agency. Or so it might seem. In this article I suggest that even in this, the simplest depiction of the story of Canute, the relationship between structure and agency is more complex and involved than it appears. This complexity is only accentuated if we turn from the legend to the historical evidence. Moreover, by reflecting on Canute's practical negotiation of the 'problem' of structure and agency we can not only gain an interesting political analytical purchase on a seemingly familiar tale, but we can also generate a series of valuable and more general insights into our understanding of the structure–agency relationship. In particular, the (various) stories of King Canute and the waves alert us to the need: (1) to maintain a clear distinction between the empirical and the ontological; (2) to resist the temptation to attempt an empirical adjudication of ontological issues (or, indeed, an ontological adjudication of empirical issues); (3) to differentiate clearly between the capacities of agents with respect to material/physical structures on the one hand, and social/political structures on the other; (4) to acknowledge the significance of unintended consequences; (5) to attend to the 'performative' dimensions of agency; and (6) to recognise the dangers inherent in an overly instrumental view of actors' motivations and intentions.     

Envisaging the future — scenarios and public affairs practice

Public affairs in the third millennium will develop in three significant ways.

• (1) It will deal increasingly with global issues and authorities. ‘The chief executive needs to be an entrepreneur with global vision. He needs political skills, to steer a course through the regulatory maze.’
• (2) The companies that succeed may be global, but many of the regimes of regulation and control will remain national. The ability to deal with them will be essential.
• (3) Public affairs will have to deal effectively not only with national and international regimes but also with organised ‘civil society’. NGOs have now formed global alliances. They are recognised and consulted formally and informally and have begun to ‘show their teeth’.

These developments create strong and specific challenges for corporate communications. ‘Sovereignty is what you belong to.’ The European Union (EU) has developed as a model for global public affairs. Companies that have learnt to combine national with supranational public affairs in the EU will be well equipped in the fora of WTO, OECD, ILO and others yet to come. The communications challenges are two:

• (1) Support for mergers: As globalisation proceeds by merger, companies will need fluency in communicating the benefits of mergers, both internally and externally.
• (2) Trading identities: As countries go for national brands to achieve tourism and investment, mega‐merged global companies are using nation‐building techniques to achieve internal cohesion across cultures.

Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications